Crowdsourced virtual supercomputer revs up virus research

2020-03-23

Washington (AFP) – Gamers, bitcoin “miners” and companies large and small have teamed up for an unprecedented data-crunching effort that aims to harness idle computing power to accelerate research for a coronavirus treatment.The project led by computational biologists has effectively created the world’s most powerful supercomputer that can handle trillions of calculations needed to understand the structure of the virus.More than 400,000 users downloaded the application in the past two weeks from “[email protected],” according to director Greg Bowman, a professor of biochemistry and molecular biophy…